MS-BI

Hi :
At present there are a lot of components in the MS-BI stack which we use, many of them in a disjointed manner. For example there is the SQL Server stack of ssis, ssas, ssrs. then there is office excel with pivot, powerpivot and powerview. Now there is PowerBI.

We use all these components to cobble together a solution. We see it as MSBI, however I get a feeling that inside Microsoft there are different products, and therefore all of them do not get an 'integrated' focus. For example my suggestion on connectivity to SAP got a review that this should be referred to the SSIS team. True from the MS perspective. But if PowerBI has to get the wide industry acceptance from business organisations, connection to SAP R3, BW etc.. has to happen, whether it is via powerquery, or ssis or tabular whatever. I would request MS to see BI holistically rather than product oriented. For example Powerview is a dashboarding tool, while Pivot is a tool more for doing a deep dive. if these both are connected to each other via shared parameters, there would be no better BI tool in the world. Similarly SSRS has a great subscription functionality. The same functionality should seamlessly exist in Powerview, Pivot etc.. which can send snapshots of reports to end users. The absolutely great thing you have done is to connect the on premise ssas tabular to powerbi, and this sort of convergence we wish to see in all MS-BI functionality..each tool should talk to others. So if PowerBI is the brand name of the MS-BI stack, then it should be self contained so that one does not have to refer to anything else. Thank you for a patient hearing.

Sanjay